The modern world is already difficult to imagine without an abundance of media content, including audio and video data. It would seem that until recently, the ultimate dream was a collection of MP3 files. And today, 4K video files are already perceived as something ordinary. All this media content needs to be created, placed somewhere and then made available to them. Modern storage systems (and including) are perfectly suited as one of the main tools for working with content.
Of course, the main consumers of capacity and bandwidth of communication channels are video data. The constant growth of video frame resolution increases the requirements for hardware. As a result, the equipment that was still relevant yesterday is rapidly becoming obsolete. After all, a typical transition to the next generation of resolution entails a fourfold increase in the number of points in the frame. As a result, just one minute of uncompressed 8K video takes up more than 100GB.
Today, professional work with high-definition video content is no longer the prerogative of only large studios. The growing popularity of series, streaming and high-definition television is attracting more and more players into this business. All these studios are constantly generating a huge amount of "raw" material that requires further processing.
It just so happened that the bulk of the workers in the content production industry are creative people. And among them, the main approach to solve the technical issues of working with disk capacity was to purchase new external drives. As a rule, desktop NAS models with 2-5 disks acted in their role. Choice due to simple and understandable procedures for their operation among non-technical specialists. The speed of work is quite acceptable for individual use as a DAS (especially with interfaces such as Thunderbolt or USB 3.0). If you need to share data, such a NAS (aka DAS) simply connects to another workstation.
With an increasing volume of source material and an increase in the number of workers involved in its processing, this approach (let's call it "traditional") shows its failure with might and main. Not only is the number of "boxes" growing sharply (and at the same time the cost of acquiring them), but the convenience of accessing data is also falling sharply. And when working together, problems appear like from a cornucopia: data access conflicts, insufficient speed, etc. Therefore, the βtraditionalβ approach is increasingly being replaced by more modern solutions based on a centralized storage (or several storages) and organizing content sharing.
Of course, just by purchasing the transition to a new concept of working with content does not end there. You will also need to organize data sharing and provide high-speed exchange between storage and content processing nodes. There can be several examples of building a content processing infrastructure. The main ones are the following:
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The simplest case for small studios. To organize access to data, file protocols are used, the operation of which is provided .
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Medium-sized studios that work on several projects in parallel. Here, a reasonable choice would be to organize access to data through a pool of servers. In this case, it is possible to implement fault-tolerant access to content in 24/7 mode by duplicating all key components: servers, communication channels, switches and storage controllers. Constant access to data is extremely important when processing video material for a long time, because no one wants to lose a huge amount of time, for example, due to a failure in the rendering process. Also, if you have a pool of servers, it is possible to provide load balancing for workstations in order to improve overall performance.
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Large studios, including those aimed at broadcasting. In such projects, fault tolerance due to duplication of components is already a must. Also, to speed up all the main resource-intensive processes for rendering and post-processing, they were moved from workstations to special servers that have the fastest access to content storage systems. Moreover, multi-level data storage is often used. Those. slow but capacious HDDs are used for storing source materials and archives, as well as fast SSDs for operational work and / or caching. Within the framework of a single storage system, several pools of different types of media are created for this, and automated tools such as ΠΈ . In really large-scale projects, storage tiering is achieved through the use of several storage systems, each of which stores .
As an example of the implementation of the work of a media studio, we would like to cite the organization of the content processing process at one of the television broadcasting stations in Taiwan. Here, a reasonably sufficient scheme for constructing the system, described in paragraph 2, is applied.
All media content is stored on storage and JBOD expansion shelf . The chassis and shelf are equipped with 24 NL-SAS disks with a capacity of 14TB each. Disk space configuration:
- Storage - 24x RAID60 pool
- Expansion shelf - 22x RAID60 pool. 2 x hot spare
The pool of servers for providing access to data is a cluster of 4 servers based on Windows Server. Access to content is organized through the CIFS protocol. Physically, all 4 servers are connected to storage via Fiber Channel 16G without the use of switches, . Clients access the server pool through a 10GbE network. Clients use Edius v9 software in a Windows environment. Load types:
- Working with 4K video for 7 streams - 2 clients
- Working with 2K video for 13 streams - 10 clients
As a result, under the specified loads, the system provides a stable total performance of 1500 MB / s, which is comfortable for the current operation of the TV station. If more disk space is needed, the customer simply needs to add additional shelves and expand the existing array with new disks. Of course, all these operations can be performed online, without interrupting workflows.
Media has always played an important role in the life of society. Today, this is more evident than ever in connection with the development of streaming and the entertainment industry. "Heavy" content requires a serious approach when building solutions for its processing. And one of the important elements in such a solution is the disk subsystem. The storage system fits this role perfectly, providing reliable and high-speed access, as well as easy expansion and performance scaling.
Source: habr.com